Prince Shen Jingye moved like water and lightning combined.
One moment he was between Lin Qianxue and the assassin. The next, his hand shot out, striking the masked man's wrist with surgical precision. The knife clattered to the floor.
But instead of taking advantage of the situation, he stepped back and looked at Lin Qianxue with those cold, ancient eyes.
"Let's see what you're really capable of," he said quietly. "Defend yourself."
Then he kicked the fallen knife toward her feet.
The assassin lunged.
Instinct took over. Lin Qianxue's body moved before her mind could catch up, not with the hesitant grace of a sheltered noblewoman, but with the brutal efficiency of someone who'd taken twelve years of Krav Maga classes in her previous life.
She sidestepped the lunge, grabbed the assassin's extended arm, and used his own momentum to send him stumbling past her. A move drilled into her muscle memory by an ex-military instructor in a corporate self-defense seminar.
The assassin recovered quickly, too quickly for an ordinary servant. He spun and attacked again, this time with trained combinations that spoke of real martial arts training.
But Lin Qianxue had spent four years studying mixed martial arts as stress relief from board meetings. Her body might be younger, weaker, still healing from torture, but her mind remembered every technique.
She blocked his punch with a cross-body deflection. Stepped into his guard. Drove her elbow up toward his chin in a classic Jeet Kune Do strike that Bruce Lee had made famous.
The assassin barely blocked it, but his eyes went wide with shock.
"Impossible," he breathed.
Lin Qianxue pressed her advantage. Low kick to destabilize. Palm strike to the solar plexus. Chain punches that backed him against the wall.
The assassin fought desperately now, he had reach, but she had four hundred years of martial arts evolution on her side.
She caught his arm mid-strike, twisted it using a joint lock that wouldn't be developed until the 20th century, and drove her knee into his ribs. Something cracked.
He gasped and swung wildly with his free hand. His fist connected with her cheek, snapping her head back. Stars exploded in her vision.
But she didn't let go. Instead, she used the momentum to spin him around, getting behind him, arm locked around his throat in a chokehold.
"Who sent you?" she hissed.
He struggled, clawing at her arm. His mask came loose, falling away.
The face beneath was young. Unfamiliar. A servant's face she'd never seen before in either the original Lin Qianxue's memories or her own observations of the household.
But his eyes, there was something in those eyes that made her breath catch.
The way they widened. The specific pattern of crow's feet at the corners. The slight asymmetry in the left iris.
Zhang Wei's eyes.
"You..." The assassin's voice was strangled, partly from the chokehold, partly from shock. "How do you know Jeet Kune Do? That's... that's not..." He coughed, struggling for air. "That technique won't exist for three hundred years!"
Lin Qianxue's grip loosened slightly in shock.
He knew. He actually knew.
Which meant he wasn't just reincarnated, he remembered his past life. Remembered the future. Remembered dying in 2024 and somehow finding his way back to 1625.
Just like her.
"Zhang Wei," she whispered.
His eyes met hers in the dim moonlight, and in them she saw confirmation. Recognition. And fear.
"Lin Yue." Not a question. A statement.
They stared at each other, two people from four hundred years in the future, wearing borrowed bodies, caught in an impossible situation.
"You poisoned me," Lin Qianxue said quietly. "You and Xu Mei. On my birthday. You stole my company and killed me."
"And you would have destroyed everything." His voice was ragged, desperate. "Your AI project, if you'd completed it, if it had gone online, do you have any idea what would have happened? We were trying to save the world!"
"By murdering me?"
"By stopping you before…"
He lunged suddenly, using her moment of distraction to break free. His hand closed around the fallen knife.
Lin Qianxue reacted on pure instinct.
She grabbed his wrist. Twisted. Used his own forward momentum against him.
The knife redirected.
Plunged into his chest.
They both froze.
The assassin, Zhang Wei, looked down at the blade buried between his ribs. Blood spread across his dark clothes, black in the moonlight.
"I tried to warn you," he whispered, blood flecking his lips. "This timeline... it's not what you think. She's not what you think. The loop…" He coughed violently. "You'll understand. When you remember. All the times before..."
"What are you talking about?" Lin Qianxue demanded, but her hands were shaking. She'd killed him. Actually killed him. Felt the resistance of flesh and muscle as the blade went in.
"Loop forty-seven," Zhang Wei gasped. "This is loop... forty-seven. You've done this... so many times. And every time..." His eyes started to glaze. "Every time, you become... the monster..."
He slumped forward. Lin Qianxue caught him instinctively, lowering him to the floor. His chest stopped moving. The life left his eyes.
Dead.
She'd killed Zhang Wei.
Again.
Or for the first time, depending on how you counted.
Lin Qianxue stood slowly, staring at her hands. They were covered in blood. The knife lay on the floor beside the body. Her room was destroyed, furniture overturned, blood splattered across the walls, a dead man in servant's clothes bleeding out on her floor.
She should have been panicking. Crying. Horrified at taking a life.
But instead, her mind was already calculating. How to explain this. What story would work. Whether she could use it to her advantage.
The door burst open.
Xiao Lan stood in the doorway, a tray of medicine in her hands. Her eyes went from Lin Qianxue to the body to the blood to the broken window.
She screamed.
The tray crashed to the floor. Porcelain shattered. The scream brought running footsteps from down the corridor.
Xiao Lan kept screaming.
More footsteps. Voices. The household waking to chaos.
Lin Qianxue realized how this looked. A disturbed young woman, already accused of trying to murder her father, standing over a dead servant with blood on her hands and a knife at her feet.
She was finished.
"Interesting."
The voice came from the doorway, not from the corridor where servants were gathering, but from the opposite entrance. The private door that connected to the master's wing.
Prince Shen Jingye leaned against the frame, arms crossed, watching her with those calculating eyes.
"Most nobles would be sobbing by now," he continued, his tone conversational despite the corpse between them. "Overcome with horror at taking a life. Begging for someone to save them." His head tilted slightly. "But you're not doing any of that, are you, Miss Lin? You look..."
He paused, a slight smile playing at his lips.
"Calculating."
Their eyes met across the body of Zhang Wei.
And Lin Qianxue realized the Prince had been there the whole time.
Watching.